‘The New York Times’ Sued by Shareholders Over Biased Israel Coverage
by Maya Sulkin, TheFreePress.com. Sept. 23, 2026
Shareholders of The New York Times filed a lawsuit against the paper’s parent company on Wednesday morning, arguing the paper has failed to meet its obligation: to tell readers the truth and correct itself in a timely fashion when it doesn’t.
The suit, filed by the State Board of Administration of Florida (SBA) and the National Center for Public Policy Research (NCPPR) in New York County Supreme Court, asks a judge to force the Times board of directors to hand over internal records the company has refused to produce for four months, the majority of which pertain to the paper’s coverage of the Israel-Hamas war.
The suit includes the testimony from a whistleblower, a former Times employee who is Jewish and spent nearly a decade on the paper’s video desk. According to the suit, the whistleblower raised concerns about antisemitism and anti-Israel bias on her desk at least 15 separate times between 2019 and her March 2026 departure, using every channel the company makes available to employees, including her managers, the standards desk, and human resources.
In an exclusive interview with The Free Press, the whistleblower said, “The public deserves a better picture of how the Times manufactures the news when Jews or Israel are involved.” She asked to remain anonymous over concern for her family’s safety. She is not named in the suit.
The whistleblower noted in the suit that in the immediate aftermath of Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack on Israel, staffers on the video desk spent weeks searching for evidence that Hamas did not use the tunnels beneath al-Shifa Hospital, even after the Israeli military released its own footage of the tunnels in November 2023. At the desk’s November 20, 2023, morning meeting, the whistleblower’s supervisor referred to them as “alleged tunnels,” the suit says.
In one of several meetings with Times management, the whistleblower spoke to human resources representative Chante Williams about the broader culture of anti-Israel bias on the video desk, to which Williams told her, “If you don’t like our values here, maybe you should go find a place whose values align with yours,” according to the suit.
Since October 7, the Times has been plagued by allegations of anti-Israel bias in its coverage. Last week alone, the Times published three significant errors in its coverage of the region.
In a September 15 article, the Times referred to Sharif Labad, who was killed in a drone strike, as “a Civil Defense rescue service worker,” and made no mention of the fact that the Israel Defense Forces identified Labad as one of the members of the Hamas Nukhba force who invaded Israel on October 7. The story has not been updated.
The same day, an article on the Donald Trump administration’s decision to supply bombs to Israel ran with a photo caption misstating the weapons’ size as 40,000 pounds. The bombs actually weigh 2,000 pounds—a twentyfold overstatement.
The Times was also forced to issue an editors’ note on a story about NAZA, a documentary about Gaza, after the original piece stated that Israelis “still largely view themselves as the victims of Oct. 7.” The paper called that line an “editing error” that had “inadvertently suggested” the deaths of 1,200 people and the taking of 250 hostages were a matter of perception rather than fact.
This lawsuit offers outsiders the closest look yet at how the Gaza war roiled the Times newsroom and is the culmination of months of increasingly hostile correspondence from the two Times shareholders. The National Jewish Advocacy Center (NJAC), representing NCPPR, first demanded records on May 29, citing the May 11 Nicholas Kristof column titled “The Silence That Meets the Rape of Palestinians.” The piece alleged a pattern of sexual violence by Israeli forces against Palestinians, including a claim that Israeli guards used trained dogs to rape detainees. In that letter, NJAC wrote to the board of directors that Kristof’s sources “were actually known and convicted criminals,” rather than the independent witnesses they were presented as. The SBA’s own demand came on August 10, when Florida attorney general James Uthmeier wrote his own letter to the Times on behalf of SBA.
The shareholders argue that since The New York Times’ own SEC filings describe its credibility as a core business asset, and warn investors that a “perception that our journalism is unreliable or biased” pose a real risk to the business, shareholders are entitled to know whether the board of directors is actually ensuring that the newsroom adheres to its own standards.
“Many New York Times readers have perceived a consistent anti-Jewish and anti-Israel bias for quite some time,” David Benger, an attorney who is representing NJAC, told The Free Press. “Shareholders are entitled to see whether the board was watching at all.”
A spokesperson for the Times provided a statement to The Free Press, saying, “This lawsuit has no merit and was brought for an improper purpose. Although it is positioned as a corporate governance petition to inspect the company’s books and records, it is a transparent attempt to exert agenda-driven pressure against an independent media organization, level false allegations of bias, and chill journalism protected by the First Amendment. We will defend against the suit vigorously.”
The Times has rejected the petitioners’ previous demand for records, twice calling it “pretextual” and accusing the shareholders of trying to silence protected journalism. Facing continued refusal, the shareholders narrowed their ask to bare governance documents: board agendas, charters, and versions of the company’s standards handbook. The suit says that, at a September 1 meeting, the Times told the shareholders the paper would not provide any of the requested documents.
One of the most glaring instances of alleged bias detailed in the lawsuit is the viral photograph of a Gazan child named Mohammed Zakaria al-Mutawaq, which ran under a headline alleging “Gazans Are Dying of Starvation.”
The photograph, which ran July 25, 2025, was captioned that he was “born healthy,” insinuating that his emaciated appearance was a result of the ongoing conflict.
Four days after the piece was published, the Times issued an editors’ note, clarifying that “after publication of the article, the Times learned from his doctor that Mohammed also had preexisting health problems.”
But the suit says that when the freelance photographer uploaded his photo to the Times’ internal photo system on the morning of July 23, his caption described the child “as suffering from severe malnutrition, according to his mother, citing a medical diagnosis at two named hospitals, and says nothing of any other condition.”
“At 3:54 p.m. that day, a company photo editor recorded in the article’s editing system that a named standards editor and two photo managers ‘have all okayed the photo edit,’ and at 4:02 p.m. a second editor recorded that the standards editor ‘has also given it a standards read,’ ” the suit continues.
A photo of the same child was publicly available on Getty Images, which describes the toddler as having “moderate malnutrition in addition to preexisting congenital health issues, including brain complications and muscle atrophy.”
The suit argues that the Times inserted the “born healthy” caption “without any confirmation from a medical professional . . .in direct violation of its editorial standards and for the explicit purpose of driving a specific narrative.”
A 2026 Yale study by Edieal Pinker, a professor at Yale University’s School of Management, reviewed more than 1,500 Times articles on the war. Pinker found that the paper’s coverage “assigns near-exclusive agency and responsibility to Israel while diminishing Hamas’s role in sustaining the conflict,” which the suit argues “could plausibly influence the opinions of a reader in a direction that is at odds with reality.”
The suit also discusses Soliman Hijjy, a freelance video journalist the Times stopped using in 2022 after, according to the whistleblower, social media posts from him praising Adolf Hitler surfaced. He was rehired within days of October 7, 2023.
The whistblower’s supervisor, Solana Pyne, said in a meeting that Hijjy’s posts “don’t in any way meet our standards,” according to the suit. Pyne explained that there is no Holocaust education in Gaza, and acknowledged that the Times tolerates known violations, the suit contends. Reeducation would be part of Hijjy’s rehiring, Pyne told the whistleblower.
The whistleblower was told the rehiring had been highly vetted, and “the top brass were okay with hiring him,” the suit says. After an outside media-monitoring organization reported the rehiring, Hijjy’s “byline then disappeared” from the paper’s coverage, despite him continuing to write and help report stories, according to the whistleblower.
The Times maintains written rules specifically barring staff from public political expression about the war. In June 2020, the standards desk instructed the newsroom to avoid participating in social media advocacy and protests or making donations to advocacy groups around news events or controversies they are covering, the suit says. On November 2, 2023, standards leadership reiterated to the entire staff: “We should not sign petitions or join organized protests related to the [Israel-Gaza] conflict. These guidelines cover all our journalists, not just those involved in the coverage.” A June 2024 policy, the suit says, warned that “if our journalists are perceived as biased or if they engage in editorializing on social media, that can undercut the credibility of the entire newsroom,” and that violations “will be noted on performance reviews.”
In March 2024, the suit states that the whistleblower filed a complaint in EthicsPoint, the Times’ confidential reporting system, about Matthew Cassel, a freelancer hired to cover Israel who has called himself a “critic of Zionism” and previously contributed to the publication Electronic Intifada. The complaint was allegedly closed two days later. Cassel kept working for the paper through December 2025.
On August 1, 2024, in a meeting attended by human resources, the suit says that the whistleblower’s supervisor, Pyne, told her “it’s not your job to be the ombudsman of The New York Times”—a position, notably, the paper eliminated in 2017—and that colleagues were now “reluctant to work with” her, due, she was told, to her “point of view,” the suit says.
According to the suit, HR asked the whistleblower to edit or delete an internal Slack supporting Jewish colleagues, but when other staffers “engaged in public advocacy on the war in favor of Palestine, which she reported through the same channels,” there was “no such request to edit or delete their support,” as far as the whistleblower is aware. She also “told human resources, on tape, that her desk head had instructed her not to escalate concerns about bias beyond her,” the suit claims.
At the center of the suit is the argument that the Times has no board-level mechanism to catch any of its errors before an outside critic does. The paper has effectively admitted as much.
In 2017, then-publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. eliminated the paper’s public editor position, which reported to the publisher rather than the executive editor and was empowered to question newsroom decisions publicly. Sulzberger’s reasoning was that “our followers on social media and our readers across the internet have come together to collectively serve as a modern watchdog.” No internal or board-level replacement has existed since.
This lack of oversight, the suit argues, has resulted in a series of errors that fall under a distinct anti-Israel bias. A 2024 peer-reviewed study cited in the filing found the Times conceded 72 such errors in its Israel-Hamas war coverage between October 2023 and June 2024 alone.
The suit alleges the errors in the Times’ coverage included the following:
The October 17, 2023, headline attributing the al-Ahli Hospital explosion to an Israeli air strike contained five separate errors. The Times’ first correction addressed only a mischaracterized video. The complete editors’ note—conceding the coverage “relied too heavily on claims by Hamas”—came six days later, after President Joe Biden and U.S. intelligence had already publicly attributed the blast to a Palestinian rocket.
A December 16, 2023, article on the Israeli withdrawal from the area around the Kamal Adwan Hospital described the Israeli military as “Israeli occupation forces”; the company’s editing record shows the word “occupation” was struck by an editor the following morning, and the record contains no published correction.
A December 22, 2023, headline claiming Gaza deaths had surpassed “Any Arab Loss in Wars in Past 40 Years” stood uncorrected for six days.
A November 25, 2023, claim about the rate of civilian deaths in Gaza was resolved by quietly “erasing the paragraph” from the website “without disclosing the error or the correction,” per the study.
A January 7, 2024, article describing two men as journalists who were later identified by the Israeli military as Hamas and Islamic Jihad operatives was never corrected at all. The false description was repeated “in three other articles,” according to the suit.
In April 2019, the Times published a cartoon depicting Israel’s prime minister as a guide dog wearing a Star of David collar, leading the U.S. president, who was drawn wearing a kippah. After backlash, the company acknowledged the image “included antisemitic tropes,” and its own editorial board called it “appalling.”
The following month, in May 2019, publisher A.G. Sulzberger—who now chairs the board—committed in writing to the entire company: “We are updating our unconscious bias training to ensure it includes a direct focus on antisemitism.” The suit says that so far as the record shows, the training was never implemented. The whistleblower raised the issue again in 2024, for what she said was the fifth or sixth time, and was told only that the matter had been “escalated.”
In January 2024, a video’s summary text described “the roughly 130 people believed to be held hostage in Gaza”— phrasing that made their captivity sound contested. It was changed only after the whistleblower asked, “Do we need ‘believed to be’?”
A February 2024 video citing journalist-casualty figures from the Committee to Protect Journalists ran without disclosing how many of the dead were identified combatants—information the whistleblower says was readily available when she flagged it before publication.
In June 2024, the whistleblower and other staffers filed reports about a Times editor, Umi Syam, whom they said had publicly posted on May 26, 2024: “Rafah Holocaust—Will you join the global resistance?” The company’s revised social media guidelines, issued that same month, warned that journalists who are “perceived as biased” or who “engage in editorializing on social media” undercut “the credibility of the entire newsroom,” and made department heads responsible for enforcement. The whistleblower reported not being aware of any action taken in response to these reports.
“It is clear that when it comes to coverage of Israel, there is no oversight,” Benger said. “It is time for the adults in the room to step up and exercise their supervisory authority over the litany of errors and inaccuracies in the New York Times’ Israel coverage.”
